Literacy:Our How-To stories are coming out great! The students are doing a great job learning to write stories that teach someone how to do something. This helps us practice sequencing skills by putting steps into the correct order and also teaches us different transition words such as first, next, then, after, last, etc. Some of our topics have included How To Make a Paper Airplane, How to Brush Our Teeth, How To Build a Snowman, and How To Make a Friend. We are working on including illustrations for each step to be sure that anyone can follow our step by step directions with ease!

In Reader's Workshop, we have become Mystery Word Detectives! Our class has been selected for an important job from the SSDA (Super Secret Detective Agency). Right away we were up for the challenge! We have been receiving secret missions throughout this unit with tips on how to become a word detective and decoding strategies that we can use to help us solve tricky words. We can also tell the difference between words that need our detective skills, and words that we can read and write in a snap without any sounding out! Ask us about our special detective lenses that we use while reading with a partner!

Math:Just a reminder that for math, we use an interactive GoMath! series that gives students access to many resources found on the ThinkCentral webpage; the link can be located on my class homepage. Remember that all students can access our Math Curriculum at home on the website. Their login and password is simply their student ID.

We are almost finished with Chapter 4! The students have really begun to grasp the different strategies we use. We are constantly reminding each other that it is not just about getting the correct answer (although that is very important) but explaining how we got our answers by explaining strategies. Chapter 4 has been all about subtraction strategies, such as counting back, making a ten, and using addition facts we know. We are amazed to see how strong the relationship between addition and subtraction is! Please continue to practice basic facts to strengthen student fluency.

Phonics: For phonics, we have been busy identifying and "marking up" different parts of words. We have been recognizing and underlying digraphs in different words, and have learned that these can be found at the beginning, middle, or ends of words. We learned the glued sound –all and soon will be learning, -an, and –am. We mark these up with a box. We recognize bonus letters (f, l, s, z) that are at the end of words and we mark these up by starring the second letter. This month we will also introduce suffixes. At first we will focus on the suffix -s but we will investigate more soon! Ask students to identify the baseword and suffix while reading and spelling! We are continuing practicing trick words that cannot be tapped out.

Social Studies: For social studies, we will learn about differences between wants and needs. We are also exploring all the different types of traditions that families celebrate during this holiday season.